Friday, May 15, 2020

Specifics of Childrens Understanding of the Earth Free Essay Example, 1750 words

In addition to the biological and environmental factors affecting child development, their age is the manner in which questions of the study are posed. The exact nature of questions as they are presented to a child may have an effect on how that child perceives the physical phenomenon and how they are then able to apply conceptual ideas to explain that phenomenon. One of the most basic divisions on how questions are posed to study participants is whether the question is open ended or close ended. Either type of question has its advantages and disadvantages and may have an effect on how the child s responses are formulated and rated. While one might anticipate that open-ended questions would allow the child the greatest leeway in their answers and offer the greatest insight into the participant s level of scientific consistency, this is not always the case. For example, a recently composed questionnaire was created that contained 40 open ended questions. This survey was easy to create and implement, but experienced difficulties once the participants had completed it. In particular, the respondents provided a large amount of extraneous information that was difficult and time-consuming for the researchers to sift through and the responses themselves were often difficult to quantify for comparison (Henning, 2009). We will write a custom essay sample on Specifics of Childrens' Understanding of the Earth or any topic specifically for you Only $17.96 $11.86/pageorder now These issues illustrate how, while they allow participants greater leeway in providing information to the facilitator, open-ended questions can prove problematic in analysis and quantification once the data has been collected, problematic for scientific research. In turn, forced-choice or close ended questions are nearly the opposite of open ended questions in their advantages and disadvantages. The first significant difference is that these questions can be more difficult and time consuming to write than their open ended cousins. Care must be given to the selection of choices offered by each question, specifically to not clutter the selection with highly unlikely options, to arrange the choices in an appropriate manner that does not unduly influence the selection process, and to include all commonly selected choices as options.

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